Anthony Coffey’s Art Blog

Wooded Scene with 2 Abandoned Opel GTs.

I found these 2 Opel GTs in a wooded lot in upstate New York. Always loved these cars. They looked so lonely and had to paint them.

It was beautiful day today here in New York. Friday was 9/11 and it put be in a melancholy mental fog for the past 2 days. Today is a bright and beautiful day,  so I decided to go out for a walk, clear my mind, and paint something. Perfect day for a watercolor.

Here is a watercolor I did while in Venice: it is the Lion in St Mark’s Square

For Immediate Release

New York Artist Paints Melted Money. Is It Silly, Serious, Or State Of Our Economy?

The latest works of Anthony Coffey entitled “BankRoll-MoneyMelt,” an exploration by the artist on our perceptions and concepts of money. Sales of the works are being conducted by appointment only and can be scheduled with Tatiana Mikhailenko, Public Relations Manager, at 646-732-8827. The works can be previewed at the artist’s website: www.anthonycoffey.com

New York, NY, (PRWEB) – March 20, 2009 – Since the historic 2008 election, a lot of artists have created images of the American president, Barack Obama. But one New York artist has focused on presidents of the American past. In particular, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and the early American Statesmen and Inventor, Benjamin Franklin. These are the ones everybody wants to have in their art collection – especially in their wallets, bank accounts, and investment portfolios.

“It’s about money and our mental state,” says artist Anthony Coffey, “we are all art collectors and we don’t even know it. We run around and ‘stuff’ our pockets with these greenish bits of engraved paper that are printed from a single Federal source,
and then use it to buy ‘stuff’ to fill our closets, cupboards, and egos.”

It is uncanny how the melted money paintings coincide with current economic events. American artist Anthony Coffey has been working on the “BankRoll-MoneyMelt” paintings for almost a decade, long before the economic downturn and all the Federal bailouts that are now occurring. Now, these melted money paintings resonate with the current global economic “meltdown.”

The collection of “BankRoll-MoneyMelt” paintings includes 10 completed works and 10 more in progress. Each one is hand drawn; the medium used is acrylic on canvas with an average size of 40 in. x 56 in (102 cm x 142 cm).

The “BankRoll-MoneyMelt” paintings can be viewed at the artist’s online gallery at: www.anthonycoffey.com

About the Artist
Anthony James Coffey was born July 10, 1967 in Boone, North Carolina and currently lives and works in New York City. He received a BS degree from UNC – Appalachian State University (1990), an Art Foundation exchange program at Cardiff Institute School of  Art and Design (1987-1988), UK, and a BFA degree from the Art Institute of Boston (1994).

For more information, please contact:

Tatiana Mikhailenko,
Public Relations Manager,
Anthony Coffey Art
Phone: 646-732-8827
tatiana@anthonycoffey.com
www.anthonycoffey.com

http://www.prweb.com/releases/anthonycoffey/bankrollmoneymelt/prweb2250724.htm

http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20090320/bs_prweb/prweb2250724_1

Wall Street Bull, New York on Subway Map

Media:  Pigment Transfer on NYC Subway Map

Size: 32 in. x 22.5 in (81 cm x 57 cm)

Year Created: 2008

The “Bank Roll Money Melt” [Meltdown] Paintings

The idea for the “Bank Roll Money Melt” paintings came from my childhood favorite toy
and
a walk along Wall Street in New York City.

As a child, I loved to play with Silly Putty, spending hours pressing it,
transferring images of the Sunday comics, to stretch and distort them.

In 1996, I temped at an investment firm in the financial district.
One day walking to work, I overheard a conversation by two businessmen walking along Wall Street…..

“This country isn’t about class or culture.
America is about money.
You will be worshipped and revered when you have money.
If you lose your money or don’t have it, you’re nothing.”

So what is money? After all, it is just a piece of richly engraved greenish artwork on fine paper,
limited edition prints of artwork created and printed by a single Federal source.

Or, is it more than that?

Perhaps it is our mindset about it:
whether it is positive or negative,
rigid or contorted, silly or serious….

Each painting is an original and the medium used is acrylic on canvas.

With the information age of media, internet and print, all of us are constantly bombarded by visual information to the brink of overload and we are not consciously aware of it.

The concept behind the “Head Candy” series is to show sensory overload of all the visual data we take in daily.

Our subconscious mind filters the visual data and then archives some and deletes others. Sometimes the images cannot be completely erased and they leave a ghosted, residual image in our minds where we have to sit down, relax and scrub our minds of the data in order to remove or understand it.

“Head Candy” was chosen as a term to convey the intense, concentrated, sugary sweet servings (or “sight bytes”) of information we receive daily from media advertising, the internet, and television. Our minds digest these images, and then they dissolve, becoming interconnected with our own thoughts and ideas.

The medium used to create this series is pigment transfer, graphite and acrylic on watercolor paper.

“If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?”
– Steven Wright

The “Light Speed Astronauts” Collection are a creative visual interpretation of what Astronauts might look like as they travel near the speed of light.

Two Astronauts were racing by you (the viewer) in their spaceship at the threshold of light speed. And you had a special freeze frame camera or projector that could capture an image at a millionth of a nanosecond of that instance where they were right in front of you as they raced by, how would they look? The color spectrum could not keep up with their velocity, so what would their color be at that instant they passed the viewer?  What would the colors be?

Depending on the Astronaut’s angle of trajectory, how would that change the viewer’s color perception and image? Would the image still have human form? Would the image be stretched or distorted?

The “Light Speed Astronauts” Collection are a creative visual interpretation of that effect.

The art medium is acrylic on canvas.

New Artwork Upload du Jour: Grand Central Terminal, NY

Today I uploaded 1 drawing and 1 Watercolor I did last summer of Belvedere Castle in Central Park, NY.

It is in the Middle of Manhattan but you would never know it with the castle, the small lake and the green trees.